Dr. Elliot Smith has claimed that the search for the elixir of life has been one of the main preoccupations of man since the earliest historical times. In this paper I have tried to show that this search has been a real thing, and not merely a theme for poets and story-tellers. There has been in the minds of those who studied alchemy, who sought far and wide for givers of life and fitted out expeditions for the Isles of the Blest, a drive that impelled them onwards. What was the real nature of this drive? It undoubtedly must have owed its existence to the instinctive desire that we all have to preserve our lives, to escape death, and to obtain for ourselves all that will add to our comfort and well-being. This desire is possessed by all human beings, and when men began to build up beliefs about "givers of life," the drive would soon get to work to impel them to apply them in a practical manner.
In adopting the point of view that certain people of antiquity have possessed a drive that impelled them forward, while others who had it not have remained stagnant, we are falling into line with modern psychology. Our President has lately published a work[1] in which he emphasises the part played in our lives by the instinct of self-preservation. It would seem that in the search for givers of life we have another example of the workings of this instinct. In certain ways this drive has been beneficial to men: in others it has been a tragedy of the first order. We owe to it much of our modern science. But we owe to it also the consequences of the efforts of men to catch a will-o'-the-wisp, and to-day are suffering from the effects of the consequent wrong building up of civilisation in the turmoil and misery that surround us. Nevertheless, the recognition of the real nature of the processes that have built up civilisation will in the end prove beneficial. We shall be able to examine the behaviour of man in the past in a similar manner to that in which we study the
- ↑ Instinct and the Unconscious. Cambridge, 1920.
